WASHINGTON – In a newly released audio recording of an
October 1971 conversation with President Richard Nixon, then-California
Gov. Ronald Reagan is heard making racist remarks about a Tanzanian delegation
to the United Nations.

In an article published Tuesday in The Atlantic,
New York University history professor Tim Naftali writes that the conversation
occurred the day after the U.N. voted to recognize China’s communist
government.

Members of the Tanzanian delegation celebrated the
decision to seat a delegation from Beijing by dancing in the General
Assembly. That infuriated Reagan, who called Nixon to tell him he thought
the U.S. should “get the hell out” of the U.N., which he called a
“kangaroo court.”

“Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television
as I did,” Reagan said. “To see those monkeys from those African
countries – damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes.”

Nixon burst into laughter after hearing the
remark, which occurs at around the 6:30 mark in the recording below.

“Well, and the tail wags the dog there doesn’t it? The tail
wags the dog,” the president said. Reagan agreed.

Naftali, who worked as the director of the Nixon Presidential
Library from 2007 to 2011, said the National Archives first released the
recording of the talk between Nixon and Reagan in 2000, but the above
portion of the conversation was cut out to “protect Reagan’s
privacy.”

He said that last year that he asked the National Archives to
conduct a new review of Nixon’s conversations with Reagan. Reagan’s 2004 death
ended any privacy concerns, and two weeks ago, the Archives agreed to release
them online, Naftali said.

Though some critics have leveled charges of racism at Reagan for
some of his policies – such as his support for the South African government
under apartheid – and his rhetoric – such as his denunciations of “welfare chiselers” –
this conversation with Nixon appears to be one of the only documented instances
of him making such an overtly offensive statement.

Nixon’s conversations are full of racist and derogatory
comments. Naftali documents how Nixon “believed in a hierarchy of
races with whites and Asians much higher up than people of African descent and
Latinos.”

Reagan and Nixon are far from the only White House occupants
known to have made derogatory remarks. Worse than racist utterances, most
of the country’s presidents before the Civil War owned slaves, many of
them while they were in office.

By today’s standards, most presidents who were in office prior
to World War II are guilty of writings, utterances or actions that would be
deemed racist. Even Abraham Lincoln’s writings display a belief in white racial
superiority and he was long a proponent of “recolonizing” former
slaves back in Africa.

Though Lyndon Johnson passionately fought for passage of the
Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, recordings of his conversations in
the Oval Office reveal that he regularly used racial slurs about African
Americans.

The release of Reagan’s comments comes as President Donald Trump
faces accusations of racism for tweets he posted this month telling four
minority congresswomen to “go back” to the “crime infested
places from which they came.” He also referred to the majority
African-American city of Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent
infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.”
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